DANDELION fuzz floated on silver beams of moonlight as Daniel sat on a grassy hillside an hour north of the city, Déadre handcuffed to his side. In the distance, the lights of Atlanta blazed like so many earthbound stars. Above them, the moon settled toward the horizon.
He dragged his free hand through the stiff spikes in his hair. It would be dawn soon, and she was still out cold. He checked for vital signs for the thousandth time.
She wasn’t breathing. Had no pulse. But then, she wasn’t supposed to, was she?
He wasn’t sure. All the research he’d done on vampires, and he still didn’t know a thing about their basic biology. Apparently no one did, since most of the literature he’d amassed had been based more on speculation and fear than fact, as far as he could tell.
He glanced down at the unconscious woman—at least he hoped she was just unconscious—at his side. A vampire. It was still hard to believe. Not the fact that they existed. Everyone knew vampires were real; they just weren’t talked about in polite company. Kind of like venereal disease.
What he had trouble believing was that she could be one of them and still be so beautiful. She had a heart-shaped face with bowstring lips. Her dark auburn hair was thick and shiny and slid through his hands like silk. Even though she wasn’t a big woman, her body flowed from one enticing curve to another.
She was the kind of woman who had always attracted him before he’d met the long, leggy Sue Ellen. The kind of woman who still turned his head, though it made him feel guilty every time he did. Except this woman was a vampire.
Jesus, he couldn’t have killed her, could he? Only exposure to sunlight, a stake through the heart, decapitation, cremation, or being completely drained of blood by another vampire could do that.
He hoped.
Her pale skin shone like marble. A cool breeze teased her bangs over her eyes and he brushed them back and tried shaking her again.
To his relief, her eyelids finally fluttered. She groaned.
When her eyes opened, he asked, “Are you all right?”
“Wha—What was…?”
“Holy water.” He let go of her shoulders when she stiffened. “Only a couple of CCs. It was just supposed to make you weak, not knock you out.”
Wincing and arching her back, she rolled the shoulder he’d stuck with the hypodermic. “It burns.”
“Burns? Is it supposed to burn?”
“Ohhhh.”
“All right. All right. It burns. What can I do?”
She bit down hard on her lower lip. “Mmmmmmm.”
“Okay.” He picked her up, curving his shackled left arm behind her back and lifting her beneath her knees with the other. “There’s water at the bottom of the hill. Regular water,” he added when she looked up at him with alarm.
She was definitely breathing now, shallow little gasps that tore at his conscience. Maybe she only stopped breathing when she slept. How the hell did he know?
At the moment, he didn’t really care. He only cared about taking away the pain carved into her ivory-smooth face.
He set her on the creek bank facing land and peeled back her leather jacket, but he couldn’t get it off over the cuffs, so he pulled it down her arm and then lifted her shirt over her head to join it.
She gasped and tried to cross her arms over her chest, but surprisingly enough, it wasn’t her breasts that had him ogling. It was the jagged scar on her shoulder.
Surely to God he hadn’t done that.
Please, don’t let him have done that.
“How did this happen?” He reached out to touch the reddened mark in the shape of a cross, but she flinched before his fingers even brushed the puffy flesh.
“Please.” Her voice was close to a whimper. “Don’t.”
He gave her one searching look, but found no answers in her dark eyes. Unable to stand her pain any longer, he leaned her back, holding her just above the water with his left arm and spooning the cool liquid over her back and upper arm with his right hand.
“Better?” he asked.
Her hair drifted on the current. Her face gradually relaxed. “Better.”
She started looking around. Cicadas serenaded her from the trees. A toad croaked downstream. “Where are we?”
“Cherokee County.”
She frowned and jiggled her wrist as if just realizing she was shackled to him. “Why?”
Avoiding her gaze, he dribbled another handful of water over the cross branded over her shoulder blade. “Because it’s a long way from anywhere.”
She shifted in his arms. “Did you bring me here to kill me?”
“No.”
“Then what do you want?”
“I told you,” he said mildly. “I want to be like you.”
“No, you don’t. Believe me, you don’t.” She craned her head toward the east. “It’ll be dawn soon. You know I can’t be out here when the sun comes up, right?”
“I know.”
She scanned the hillside, left and right. “How did we get here? You—You have a car somewhere, don’t you?”
“Somewhere.” And just in case she decided to kill him and drive off in it on her own, he added, “But the keys aren’t with it. They’re hidden.”
“You’re going to hold me here?” She sat up, turned and tried to backpedal away, but didn’t get far. She jerked the end of the short chain between their handcuffs. Her voice rose an octave. “You said you weren’t going to kill me.”
“I’m not. You’re going to kill me.” Tired of chasing her up the hill as she continued to back away from him, he pulled her to him. She wasn’t strong enough to fight. Yet. “You’re going to kill me and bring me back…like you. Then I’ll get the keys, and we’ll drive out of here together. Before the sun comes up.”
Once he had the strength and speed of a vampire, he could fight Garth on equal footing. Kill him and free Sue Ellen’s physical body from his evil influence.
What he’d have to do later to set his own soul free he wouldn’t put words to.
Not yet.
THE moments before dawn were always the darkest, the quietest, the most peaceful for a vampire. These were the moments Déadre held on to when she thought she couldn’t stand being what she was for another night. When she couldn’t stand the hunger. These were the moments she’d always hoped would be her last, should her existence ever come to an end.
She pulled Daniel’s coat tighter over her shoulders. After bathing in the creek and having gone so long without fresh blood to warm her, she had been chilled. He’d turned his jacket inside out and settled it over her shoulders. The gesture of simple kindness had touched her.
And confused her.
“Do you know what happens to a vampire in the sunlight?” she asked without looking at him. Pine and magnolia and jasmine all mingled on the breeze.
“I have a vague idea.”
“The eyes go first. Our night vision makes us so sensitive to light that we’re blinded.”
A muscle in Daniel’s jaw jumped. He jerked a blade of grass out of the ground and rolled it between his fingers.
“Then our skin begins to blister and peel. Our hair catches fire, and our internal organs start to liquefy.”
“We don’t have to be here when the sun comes up. All you have to do is…whatever you do to make me a vampire, and we’ll leave.”
“I don’t like being used.”
He turned toward her. His green eyes looked flat black in the darkness. “How is it using you to ask you to do what comes naturally to your kind?”
“I’m relatively young for one of my kind,” she said. “But I’ve been a vampire long enough to know that I don’t like it much. I won’t curse another to suffer this existence.”
“You’d rather die?”
“I died a long time ago, Daniel.” She turned her face up to the sky. The moon was gone. The first pink tinges of dawn seeped up from the eastern horizon. Already she could feel her skin prickling. Soon the heat would replace her never-ending thirst as the source of her misery. “But I’d rather not burn. There are…kinder ways.”
His face screwed up as her meaning sunk in. “You want me to kill you?”
“You’re already killing me. I’m just asking you to do it mercifully.”
“Jesus!” Daniel jerked his hand up to run through his hair, hit the end of the handcuff and winced.
He thought he’d planned for every contingency, taking care to hide the car and keys so she couldn’t kill him and take off on her own. So she needed him to survive.
How could he have known she wouldn’t want to survive?
Of all the vampires in Atlanta, he had to pick the one with a death wish.
He pulled her close. So close their noses nearly touched. Was her face already turning red from the sun?
“All you have to do is bite me, or cut me or whatever you do to get my blood.”
She said nothing, just stared over his shoulder at the blushing sky.
He pushed her to her back, straddled her, not really putting his weight on her, but pinning her down as he fished a penknife out of his pocket.
“Here, I’ll help you.” He flicked the blade open and, hesitating only a second, gouged his wrist. Blood trickled into his palm in a steady stream.
“Go ahead. Drink.” A drop of blood landed on the corner of her mouth. She pressed her lips together. “Drink, dammit! I know you want to.”
More blood splattered on her chin, her cheek. She whimpered, and threw her arm up, but it wasn’t to push his away.
It was to cover her eyes.
He glanced over his shoulder. The first bright sliver of gold shone from the horizon.
She writhed beneath him, struggling to turn away. He let her, sliding to one side, and she immediately curled into a ball on her side with her back to the sun. A spasm wracked her, then another, harder.
She covered her face with her hands, pulling his hand along, and his fingertips brushed her knuckles. They were hot. Cracking. The shell of her one exposed ear was raging red.
Christ!
He dove over her, wrapping himself around her, cradling her head. “It’s all right. It’s okay. We’re getting out of here.”
Taking only a second for one deep breath, he pulled his leather jacket up to cover her head, held the rest of her as close to him as he could, and pushed to his feet with her in his arms. Keeping himself between her and the sun as much as possible, he ran for the car.
Each step seemed to take an hour. By the time he reached her Jeep, the sun felt high and hot on his back. He retrieved the keys from the rock he’d hidden them beneath, then hurried to the Jeep parked behind a blackberry thicket, unlocked their handcuffs and settled her on the floorboard. He tucked his coat around her as best he could, then drove like a madman down the gravel road, dust and rock spewing up behind him like a monochrome rainbow. But where was he taking her? This had been his grandparent’s farm years ago, but the house and barn were long gone. There wasn’t a neighbor for miles, and even if there was—
“Hang on,” he yelled to Déadre, and wondered if she was still coherent enough to hear him. To understand.
He slammed on the brakes at the entrance to the old lane, which had once led to a two-story frame house with gingerbread trim, and skidded into the drive. The house might be gone, but there used to be a storm shelter. A dank and dark concrete hole he’d been afraid of as a kid. He’d told his grandma he’d rather blow away in a tornado than crawl down in that grave.
He rolled to a stop beside the crumbling chimney, all that was left of his grandparents’ lives. Twenty yards to his left was the split-trunked oak he used to climb. That meant the shelter should be…
There it was, the cement entry and wood doors nearly obscured by the overgrown grass.
He ran to the passenger side of the Jeep, pulled Déadre out and made a run for it. She was so hot he could feel her burning skin through the leather coat.
He kicked the door open and nearly fell down the stairs. He laid her in the shadows of the darkest corner and crouched over her.
Her chest jerked as she fought for breath. “The door.” She moaned. “Close the door.”
Cursing, he jumped up and grabbed the pull rope. The door banged shut behind him, plunging them into total darkness.
He felt his way back to Déadre, pulled her close. He couldn’t see her, but he could feel her. Her whole body was shaking, her muscles convulsing. He smelled singed hair and scorched flesh.
His heart pounded against his breastbone. Blood and guilt roared in his ears. What had he done? God, what had he done to her?
“Déadre? Stay with me, baby. Stay with me.” He rocked her gently but fiercely, afraid to hold her too tight lest he hurt her more. “Tell me what to do. How can I help? Can you hear me?”
She clutched at him mindlessly, clawed at him, practically crawled up his body, her fingernails scraping his shoulders and chest. Then she fell against him, panting, and knocked him back on his elbows, her hot face searing his bare skin.
Her tongue lashed out, swiped over one of the minor wounds she’d caused, and the touch was like a lightning strike in his blood. The heat transference was incredible. Every cell in his body sizzled.
She scraped him again, and again nuzzled the wound. He managed to string two logical thoughts together. “Blood? You need blood? Will it heal you?”
She didn’t answer. She was too busy. Her hands were as quick as her tongue. They roamed and glided, scraped and tweaked. Pleasure and pain blurred.
This was what she needed. He could feel her getting stronger. More aggressive.
His body was electric, jumping and twitching at the intensity of the sensations her recovery was causing, and when she swung one of her hips over his to hold him down, he couldn’t help but arch up into her as if she’d turned up the voltage.
He reached up to grab her, to pull her close, to hold her back, he wasn’t sure which. His blood pounded so hard he thought his veins might burst. His mind overloaded. She ground her pelvis down on his engorged sex and he grunted, thrust as if they weren’t separated by two layers of cotton and leather, his and hers. He found the hem of her shirt, slid his hands underneath and palmed her breasts, pinched the stiff nipples.
“Déadre, we’ve got to stop.” But they were beyond stopping. Far beyond.
Some part of his mind knew this was wrong. Accused him of betraying Sue Ellen. Betraying himself, his promise. Betraying Déadre, taking advantage of her when she was out of her mind with pain, with need.
Most of him didn’t care.
He bucked and she rode him. Heat poured out of her core and over his erection like a lava flow. Her greedy mouth left a trail of fire over his jaw, his neck. He tensed, as her mouth paused over his jugular, but she traveled on, down his arm, where she snatched his hand and lathed his wrist with her tongue.
His bloody wrist.
Her mouth latched on over the open cut and she sucked as greedily as a newborn. She rubbed herself against him, mewling as she drew down hard on him.
He fought the urge to resist. She needed this; he’d almost killed her. And he wanted this. It was the only way he could kill Garth LaGrange and free Sue Ellen. But now that the moment was here, panic swelled. He could feel the life force being drained out of him by the pint.
His head spun. He felt like a drunk on a three-day binge. The blood loss should have rendered him incapable of maintaining an erection, but he grew harder and thicker than ever and wondered if his stamina was a result of the thrall the authors of his research material had speculated about. The sexual excitement that stole a vampire victim’s senses, made him unaware he was being fed upon until it was too late.
If so, he could understand where vampires got their reputation as masters of eroticism.
They’d earned it.
His limbs went numb. His heart stuttered, restarted, stuttered again like an engine running out of gas. He was dying, and it didn’t seem to matter. He was almost there. Ready to climax.
Déadre was ready, too. He could feel it. Her thighs quivered on each side of his hips. She tilted her head back and took one long, last draw from his wrist, then dropped the limp appendage. With his blood smeared across her chin and cheeks, her jaw slack and eyes glazed in ecstasy, she sat down on him hard and pushed her pelvis forward, trapping his shaft in her body’s natural channel. Her upper body stiffened, hung suspended above him for a long moment, then fell forward, kissing him with a gusty sigh, and Daniel let go.
The last living things he knew were the fiery eruption of his body, the sound of her name in his throat, the taste of his blood on her mouth.
He managed to mumble four words against her slick lips. “Bring me back. Please.” But in her fevered state, he wasn’t sure she heard them.
Then with one final, shuddering pulse, his heart stopped, and his life ended.
Spent.